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CSAIL Mission

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory seeks to invent the future of computing and explore novel applications, enabling solutions to important national and global challenges. CSAIL articulates compelling interdisciplinary research visions for computing, invents fundamental new technologies, conducts basic research activities that strengthen the state of the art, and inspires and educates future generations of scientists, technology leaders, and the public. CSAIL is an innovative, passionate community that both drives the future of computing and harnesses its remarkable power.

With more than 50 research groups working on hundreds of diverse projects, CSAIL researchers focus on discovering novel ways to make systems and machines smarter, easier to use, more secure, and more efficient. The Lab’s projects fall into three broad areas of inquiry:

Artificial intelligence: We seek to understand intelligence as manifest in living systems, build artificial systems capable of intelligent reasoning, perception, and behavior, and build principled models of reasoning and thinking applicable to a wide variety of real-world problems.

Theory: We seek to understand the fundamental limits of what is efficiently computable, to realize those limits by developing provably efficient algorithms for computing platforms of today and those yet to be developed, to secure computation and communication with cryptography, and to apply theory to economics, human cognition, biology, and neuroscience.